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Magazine|Where Did All of Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers Go?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/magazine/baseball-pitchers-paul-skenes.html
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One day at Wrigley Field last May, Paul Skenes was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carving out a small piece of baseball history in his second big-league game. Just two years before, he was a sophomore at the Air Force Academy, learning to fly C-17 transport planes in preparation for a career in the military. Now he was dominating the Chicago Cubs. He struck out the first seven batters he faced. By the end of the fifth inning, he had increased his strikeout total to 10. More impressive, he hadn’t allowed a hit.
Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass
To end the sixth, Skenes, whose name rhymes with “beans,” unleashed a fastball that was foul-tipped into the catcher’s glove for an 11th strikeout. The Cubs remained hitless. At that point, Skenes had thrown exactly 100 pitches. He wouldn’t throw another. When the Pirates took the field in the bottom of the seventh, Pittsburgh’s manager, Derek Shelton, replaced him with Carmen Mlodzinski.
No-hitters are not wildly uncommon — since 1901, when the American League was formed and rules were standardized, each season has averaged around two of them. But for most of the sport’s history, they represented a peak expression of individual achievement on the mound. They weren’t quite sacrosanct, but pulling a starter when he hadn’t allowed a hit was sure to produce headlines, and no small amount of animosity in the clubhouse. Now, here was Skenes, the most heralded young pitcher in years, three innings away from throwing a no-hitter in his second start. It felt like an opening salvo by a future Hall of Famer.
Instead, he watched from the dugout as Mlodzinski allowed a single to the third batter he faced, a short fly to left field, and all the drama of the day was gone. When I asked Skenes about that, he noted that in his first start, the week before, he had been removed after 84 pitches. “The fact that they let me go 100 in Chicago,” he told me recently at the Pirates’ spring-training base, in Bradenton, Fla., “was even more than they were planning on.” And no-hitter or not, 100 pitches is pretty much the most anyone gets to throw these days.
Over the past two decades, analysts have identified a treasure trove of competitive advantages for teams willing to question baseball’s established practices. (Eventually that meant every team.) Sacrifice bunts, for example, squander the game’s signature currency: outs. Though spending an out increases the chance of scoring a run, it makes the kind of big inning on which games often turn far less likely.
